Net’s mouth hung open. ‘Meele, look, you can’t just make someone give up their child and then not explain why. Hella’s been through a lot. She deserves an explanation.’
For a moment, Meele was quiet. ‘It was for the best. She would have been raised as a force of darkness with Piper Harlem and I could not let that happen. It’s her destiny to protect us. She cannot do that if she is dark.’
‘Why would she have been dark? Piper doesn’t appear to be dark. Admittedly, I cannot see auras anymore but—’
‘It’s what I foresaw,’ Meele snapped. ‘Look, I did the right thing. It was not my intention to hurt Piper or Hella, but it was all supposed to happen this way. Not the soulless boy, perhaps, but the rest is settled. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.’ Then there was a beeping tone. Net supposed she had cut the phone call connection. He sighed.
How utterly unhelpful that was, he thought, returning to the small human. As he walked back down to the main store from the back room, the front door opened. The bell had been taken down in the wreck and not restored. Net liked the lack of sound better. Thomas Terra and Hellora walked in. They didn’t seem injured, but they both looked rather upset.
‘Hey, are you two okay?’ Net asked, setting the phone down. Elliot heard the voices and came in from the side-room. He smiled at his sister.
Hella ducked under her curtain of red hair and wiped at her eyes, then returned the smile to Elliot. ‘We…’ she seemed at a loss for words. ‘It um, it didn’t work Net.’ Net would be the first to admit that he did not entirely understand the full range of human emotions, not yet, nor could he easily read them. But there was something palpable about Hella and Tommy’s misery.
‘Did something unexpected happen?’ Net ventured.
Hella glanced at Elliot, and he sensed that perhaps he was right, but she didn’t want to speak of it in front of the child. ‘El, could you give a us minute, please?’
The child pouted. ‘I came here to learn. Nerretti and I found something, about Valhalla—’
‘El, please.’ Hella put a hand on his head and ruffled his dark red hair. ‘Just a minute.’
The child sighed dramatically then returned to the separate room. ‘Fine,’ he said.
Hella sunk onto the floor, and Tommy sat beside her. They looked exhausted. ‘What’s going on?’ Net asked. ‘Is everything okay?’
Tommy opened his mouth once, twice, then closed it and shook his head helplessly. Hella held her head in her hands, red curls falling. ‘I messed up again, Net. I mess everything up.’ There was a crack in her voice that, he guessed, meant she may be crying.
Net sat opposite the two teenagers and reached out to try to comfort her. He put a hand on her arm. ‘Hella, tell me what happened.’
She looked up at him and, indeed, there were tears on her cheeks. ‘I lost control.’
Hella and Tommy recounted what had happened at Warlock House: how Hella had found Harrow, how she had tossed him around his cell, then healed him—then shocked him—then astralled back, and then called for Amara. Net thought that Tommy usually looked rather put-together, unruffled, but now he seemed stripped down and bare. Almost afraid.
Net did not blame him.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ Hella said for the hundredth time.
Net’s hand had not moved from her arm. Now, he squeezed gently. ‘Hellora, child. I believe you. Be calm, now.’ He hoped he sounded kind.
She looked up at him. ‘How do we get his soul back? How do I figure out how to control my powers?’
Net turned and gathered up the book he had read to Elliot from, about Valhalla, and reiterated their findings. ‘It’s a start,’ he finished. ‘As for your powers, Hella, perhaps speaking with Piper could give you some insight? She is your birth-mother after all, and she seems well in control of her own magic.’ He got up and went to retrieve something. He came back and handed her a bracelet. There were stones set in the silver chain, each a colour of the rainbow. ‘This is a chakra-balancing bracelet, Hella,’ he said. ‘Put it on. Did you not wonder why Harrow couldn’t attack Piper? Did you see her athames?’
‘They were rainbow,’ Hella remembered, fastening the bracelet.
‘Yes. This will give you a steadier focus. Control. Balance,’ Net said.
Hella smiled gratefully, then called Elliot back. The boy came and sat with them, now glad to be included. He glanced up at Hella with concern. ‘You’re crying,’ he said. He reached around and gave her a hug. ‘Did someone try to kill you again?’
Still crying, Hella burst out laughing. She hugged him back. ‘No, not this time.’ Net saw her think it, saw the thought cross her mind. This time, I tried to kill them.
‘Well, at least we have a lead,’ Tommy said, ever-practical. At that moment, a noise sounded, and Tommy pulled out his phone. ‘Oh, shit.’ He glanced at Elliot and winced. ‘Sorry. I just got a text from my aunt. Harrow’s trial is in three days. If we don’t prove his soullessness by then, he’ll have his magic cut out of him. I won’t let that happen.’
Nerretti had never witnessed an Imperium Ceremony. He’d heard of them, but thought they were just rumours to scare little warlocks and faeries into being good. The thought of one of them having their magic forcefully removed even made Nerretti shudder. In his mind, he compared it to having his wings burned off—horrible, terrifying, scorching pain. We can’t let them do that to Harrow, he thought.
Hella paled.
Elliot cringed. ‘That sounds bad.’
‘It’s very bad,’ Tommy corrected. ‘We have to move on this,’ he said. Net could hear the protectiveness in his voice. ‘Now.’ They gathered up all of the books on Valhalla they could find and spent the night reading on the hard floorboards. At some point Hella conjured them food, Grace messaged asking if they were all okay, and Elliot fell asleep sitting up, his mouth open.
Net noticed that Hella’s eyes glowed just a touch of purple, like light hitting an amethyst. She still wore her athame at her belt, he was pleased to see, and her amulet. If anyone could visit Valhalla, Net thought, it was her.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
James
James Wilson had spent most of his life in a relatively Podunk town called Mill Valley in New South Wales, Australia. As he grew up, all the kids in town knew one thing for certain—the place was utterly boring. Like, break into a Bottle-shop when you’re fourteen because there’s nothing else to do. Throw a party at Valerie Winter’s place, even though she was basically the school-bitch, because there was nothing else to do. Count the tiles in your house. The steps up your driveway. Reread the same twenty books you have, even the crappy ones. This town was so boring that you did your homework because there was literally nothing else to do. And James had always hated it. Everyone his age did. Except for one girl, Alexa Graham.
She was the exception that proved the rule, and the most fun and spontaneous person James had ever known (not that that was saying a lot in Mill Valley, but it was still true). James and Alexa had been friends for years, and, after some unexplainable memory loss, they had found themselves outside of Mill Valley for the first time in their lives.
It was about three or four days ago, though he was suffering from amnesia, so that wasn’t exactly reliable. Everything in his and Alexa’s memories had shifted to a cloudy blurriness. All they had managed to piece together was that they had been held captive somewhere, in a tall building, and then the building had been attacked, and they’d gotten out. That was it.
That day, they had blindly run in the opposite direction of the building and had ended up in a little motel in Camden Haven, the next ‘town’ over. Though town was a bit of a stretch. The population was roughly two hundred. It was more of a way station than anything. Apart from some shady people that James suspected were drug dealers, he and Alexa were the only ones staying in the motel. The manager was an older woman who was about half James’s size and wore large round glasses. When they couldn’t give their names—for f
ear of being followed, not because they didn’t remember—or provide identification as they didn’t have wallets, she did not seem to mind in the slightest.
Luckily, the room had two beds. James and Alexa were close, but they were not that close, even though they had shared their first kiss a few years ago. But he didn’t think of her like that, though admittedly, her tattoos were hot. He sat on his bed, his legs folded underneath him, doodling on the motel’s stationary pad. He had desperately been trying to remember what had happened to them. It was maddening. He remembered going to school, at some point, and then it was like some big thing was missing, a whole chunk of space and time that was inexplicably gone. It was like the plot of a bad movie.
‘Are you still on that?’ Alexa asked, exiting the bathroom. She had had a shower, and her short black hair stuck up in all directions. It made her look like a rock-star, with her myriad of silver piercings in her ears. ‘Look, we have no way of knowing what we can’t remember. Why don’t we just go back home?’ She shrugged, far too unconcerned for his liking.
‘I told you before, Lex, we were abducted by someone in our town. If we go back, somehow they’ll find out, and what’s to stop them from coming after us again?’ James said, throwing the pad down.
Alexa towel-dried her hair, a frown on her face. ‘I hate it when you’re right,’ she grumbled. ‘But what are we supposed to do, just stay in this motel forever?’
James looked her over. He could tell she still felt a bit bad about breaking into that person’s car and stealing their wallet to pay for the room—but what choice did they have? It had been a very blurry day.
‘I don’t know,’ James said. ‘That’s why we have to try to remember, so we know who we’re up against.’
Alexa sighed and lay down on her bed, dampening the bedspread with her hair. ‘This place is worse than Mill Valley.’ The room, admittedly, was pretty sparse. There were the two single beds, an armchair in the corner and a rickety desk, under which was a mini fridge, plus the shabby bathroom. James was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any hot water left now.
‘Yeah, I never thought I would miss it,’ he admitted, still trying to pull the cobwebs of his memories together.
They bid each other goodnight and crept under the covers. James gave up on his notepad, at a loss for what they could not remember. All he had managed to scribble was some nonsense sign: three interconnecting ovals with a circle around them. He must have seen it somewhere, but he didn’t know what it was. Probably nothing, he thought tiredly.
James was almost asleep, his eyes heavy, when he thought he heard a noise. He tried to ignore it. In this place, he didn’t want to think too hard about what some strange noises might be: new motel residents doing the dirty, or the drug dealers arguing, it could be the manager, or the cleaning lady—who he suspected did not exist, based on the level of cleanliness, and the fact that he hadn’t seen a cleaning person yet. But this was different. Someone opened their door.
Someone was in their room. James sat up, switched on the light and yelled out. There was a man, dressed in jeans and black t-shirt, his brown hair falling into his eyes.
‘Oh, good. There are people in here,’ he said quietly.
Alexa had gasped and sat up in her bed, too. ‘Who are you?’ She said, ever brave.
‘Oh, you look much more to my taste than him,’ the man said, eyeing Alexa. ‘No offence,’ he added to James, who sat, stunned. As the man advanced on Alexa, James’s frozen-fear shattered.
He stood up and grabbed the wooden chair by the desk and hit the man over the head with it. ‘Get away from her.’
The chair shattered over his head. But he did not bleed. He turned and looked up at James, mildly annoyed. ‘Can you not?’ he said, then took Alexa by the throat and kissed her —no, James realised, he fucking bit her.
Alexa pushed and shoved at the man, and then she went limp and James tried to get the guy off her. The man didn’t move away from Alexa, who now lay unconscious, but he hit out at James, who fell, sprawling to the ground; he hit his head on the corner of his bedside table and blacked out.
Some time must have passed. James opened his eyes blearily, then yelped at the pain in his head where he’d struck it. Alexa. He scrambled to his feet. She lay on the bed, alone, her throat pumping red blood out of two wounds. The guy who had attacked them was gone.
James went to the bathroom and returned with a towel. He sat by Alexa and wrapped it around her throat to stem the bleeding. He moved to pick up the phone, to call an ambulance, when she stirred.
‘James?’ she mumbled, then sharply sucked in a breath. ‘What the hell?’ She dabbed at her neck, her fingers coming away red. ‘He bit me? Was all that a very strange dream?’ she asked. ‘Or did some total random just come into our room, knock you out and freaking bite me?’
‘No, that happened,’ James said, his hand on the phone, ready to dial. ‘Are you okay? Should I call an ambulance?’
Alexa stood slowly, then checked her neck in the mirror of the bathroom, the door open. He heard her bark of incredulous laughter. ‘It looks like I was bitten by a vampire! He must’ve been wearing sharp, fake fangs or something. If it wasn’t so rude and painful, that would almost be cool.’
‘That is most decidedly not cool,’ James said. He raised the phone, but Alexa shook her head. ‘I’m okay. I can fix this. An ambulance would ask a bunch of questions we can’t answer.’
‘Like who are you, where do you live?’ James suggested.
‘Where are your parents, why aren’t you in school?’ Alexa added. ‘Yeah, let’s not do that. Is your head okay?’ Alexa moved to the desk and fetched up the sewing kit. She took out a needle and pale-pink thread.
James cringed. ‘Oh my god, are you going to sew yourself up?’
Alexa shrugged, then winced. ‘Unless you’re volunteering?’
‘I don’t know how to do that. Do you?’ James asked.
‘How do you think all of my clothes look amazing? I redesign them myself. I know how to sew. Skin can’t be that different,’ Alexa said.
‘Than a shirt?’ James said, his voice rising. ‘You’re comparing some fashion-savvy tricks to medically re-sewing up your own throat?’
‘And the back of your head. That’s a deep gash,’ Alexa said with a frown. ‘It’ll be fine.’ She turned to face the mirror, stuck the needle into her skin and cringed. ‘Owww,’ she hissed. ‘Okay, normal sewing does not hurt this much.’
James came to sit on the edge of the bathtub beside her for moral support. ‘You didn’t realise it would hurt?’
‘No,’ Alexa admitted with a light laugh. ‘I did not think this all the way through.’ The needle had dragged the thread through the skin. ‘But, since I’ve already started…’ She winced, and kept sewing.
Chapter Thirty
Azazel
It was not enough. Azazel sighed.
He had returned to his kin with the information he had gathered from the Terra warlock: that their promised witch had cast the spell to evacuate the angels from earth. He had even roamed through Australia and devoured humans in want of getting the angel’s attention if they were still lurking here in secret. It was a dangerous game, to be sure, but one he had to play.
Azazel had enjoyed the meal uninterrupted. No angels had descended upon the farm where he dined. It was good news. Though his kin were not satisfied. They wanted to be unleashed upon the world this time, not just this country. They demanded that Azazel be sure that it was the earth as a whole that was now free of angels. Demanding children, Azazel thought. Though he did understand their fear. If he summoned them to the world, and the angels appeared, they would all be decimated.
He departed for new lands and descended upon a chunky, juicy place he had not dared to hunt in before now, a place likely to be rife with angels. Europe.
Azazel attacked when humans were most vulnerable. Nighttime. The moon and stars hid under a blanket of clouds. There was an iron tower
in the middle of this land, where people seemed to flock to and take photographs. The Eiffel Tower, the plaque called it. By this tower, as the hour grew later, Azazel loomed in the dark in a nearby park. When it was almost midnight and the crowds grew thin, a stray human wandered right into his shadow. Azazel snatched him up, gripping his mouth with sharp claws. The human writhed, staring up into his glowing yellow eyes.
Azazel smiled. If the angels are here, they are being very lazy about their hunting duties, he thought as he bit into the human with a splatter of red blood.
Chapter Thirty-One
Hella
Hella stayed up all night in Witches’ Wares, pouring over books on Valhalla by the fireplace in the adjoining room. By firelight, she flicked through page after page. She went through dozens of books, looking for answers.
Net had taken Elliot back to Grace’s place. Hella wondered how the little Cambions were holding up, as well as Grace. Tommy had insisted on staying to help, but he’d fallen asleep on the couch just before dawn. She was grateful for his help, though, and his company. Not that either had done them any good. Hella was still no closer to figuring out where Valhalla actually was. They had figured out it was in Asgard, but that could be another world, according to some of these books, or it could be Heaven itself. Until they figured out exactly where it was, the hopes of getting there—let alone finding Harrow’s soul and returning it to him before he was put on trial and had his magic grotesquely removed—were fairly slim.
Hella rubbed at her eyes. She took a deep breath, trying to clear her head. It didn’t work. She threw the book down with a thud. ‘If we don’t know where it is, how can we get there?’ she growled at the book.
Tommy sat up, his orange hair askew.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’ The windows cast the orange rays of dawn into the room, mingling with Tommy’s stuck-up hair. He’d probably only slept for an hour.
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